Cindy Betzer Pharis stands with her dog Sketch outside her new home in Sedona, Ariz. The Creek fire of December 2017 destroyed the house in Kagel Canyon where Pharis had lived for two decades. She decided not to rebuild and retired in Arizona in July. (Courtesy of Donna Lazuta)

A few days after her early morning escape a year ago from the flames that would burn down her home in Kagel Canyon, Cindy Betzer Pharis returned to see the devastation.

She went alone.

“I didn’t want to bring my daughter with me because I knew that she would cry really hard and I needed to hold it together.”

And, mostly, Pharis did, staring dry-eyed as she walked through the devastation.

She observed the skeleton of the foundation that once supported her multi-story home, with its wrap-around porch and scenic views of the sunset from the hills above Sylmar.

A few days after her early morning escape a year ago from the flames that would burn down her home in Kagel Canyon, Cindy Betzer Pharis returned to see the devastation. She went alone. “I didn’t want to bring my daughter with me because I knew that she would cry really hard and I needed […]

In this December 2017 photo, ashes are all that remain of the home where Cindy Betzer Pharis had lived for 20 years at the end of Hadler Drive in Kagel Canyon, on Thursday, Dec. 7, 2017. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)
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Cindy Betzer Pharis stands with her dog Sketch outside her new home in Sedona, Ariz. The Creek fire of December 2017 destroyed the house in Kagel Canyon where Pharis had lived for two decades. She decided not to rebuild and retired in Arizona in July. (Courtesy of Donna Lazuta)

Cindy Betzer Pharis enjoys taking walks near the red rocks with grandson Rowan Massengale and her dog Sketch near her new home in Sedona, Ariz. Pharis lost her longtime home in the hills of Kagel Canyon in the Creek fire of December 2017. (Courtesy of Cindy Betzer Pharis)

All that’s left of the multi-story home where Cindy Betzer Pharis lived for two decades are photographic images like this. The Creek fire of December 2017 destroyed the house and almost everything inside it, including her artwork, along with sketch books, poems and other writing she had kept since adolescence. (Courtesy of Cindy Betzer Pharis)

A shell-shocked Cindy Betzer Pharis sifted through the rubble of her burned out home in Kagel Canyon that she lost in December 2017 during the Creek fire. A group of volunteers called Team Rubicon who respond to disasters helped Pharis and other fire victims haul away the tons of toxic ash and rubble left behind. (Courtesy of Cindy Betzer Pharis)

The juxtaposition of a pair of copper wings from a cupola atop her home in Kagel Canyon and a ceramic sword made by one of her students caught the attention of artist Cindy Betzer Pharis on the first day she returned to view the destruction of her Kagel Canyon home after the December 2017 Creek fire. The wings and sword reminded her of a picture of the Archangel Michael that hung over the bed of a nephew who had died earlier in the year. (Courtesy of Cindy Betzer Pharis)

A few days after her early morning escape a year ago from the flames that would burn down her home in Kagel Canyon, Cindy Betzer Pharis returned to see the devastation. She went alone. “I didn’t want to bring my daughter with me because I knew that she would cry really hard and I needed […]

The skeleton of a piano that once graced the 4,000-square-foot home of artist Cindy Betzer Pharis in Kagel Canyon can be seen in the rubble left from the December 2017 Creek fire. (Courtesy of Cindy Betzer Pharis)

Cindy Betzer Pharis looks at an object plucked out of the ash and rubble that once was her multi-story home in Kagel Canyon. Pharis lost her house in the December 2017 Creek fire that ravaged parts of Los Angeles and Ventura counties. (Courtesy of Shannon McGinnis)

Cindy Betzer Pharis found these remains of an antique jewelry collection she had stored inside a safe in her house in Kagel Canyon. Pharis lost her home, her artwork, writings and other possessions in the December 2017 Creek fire. (Courtesy of Cindy Betzer Pharis)

The multi-story home that Cindy Betzer Pharis once owned in Kagel Canyon had a wrap-around porch where she loved to sip iced tea and watch the sunset. Her house was among the first of 60 to be consumed by the Creek fire that began burning in Los Angeles and Ventura counties on the morning of Dec. 5, 2017. (Courtesy of Cindy Betzer Pharis)

Cindy Betzer loved the wrap-around porch at the home she once owned in Kagel Canyon area of Los Angeles County. Her 4,000-square-foot house burned down Dec. 5, 2017, in the Creek fire. Pharis retired from her job as a high school art teacher in June and moved to Sedona, Ariz. (Courtesy of Cindy Betzer Pharis)

Art instructor Cindy Betzer Pharis, right, is surprised with a card created by her Advanced Placement Studio Art students along with snacks and a bed for Pharis’s Wirehaired Dachshund named Sketch at the end of class at Valencia High School in Valencia on Thursday, Dec. 7, 2017. An accomplished artist, Pharis lost her home near Sylmar in the Creek Fire. (Photo by Dan Watson / SCNG)

Art instructor Cindy Betzer Pharis hugs her Wirehaired Dachshund, Sketch, in her art classroom at Valencia High School in Valencia on Thursday, Dec. 7, 2017. An accomplished artist, Pharis lost her home near Sylmar in the Creek Fire. A high school art instructor, (Photo by Dan Watson / SCNG)

Family, friends, students and strangers all stepped up to help visual artist and high school teacher Cindy Betzer Pharis after she lost everything in the December 2017 Creek fire. The Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia sent her boxes of art supplies. (Courtesy of Brittany Singleton)

Cindy Betzer Pharis holds her dog Sketch outside her new home in Sedona, Ariz. The Creek fire of December 2017 destroyed the house in Kagel Canyon where Pharis had lived for two decades. She decided not to rebuild and retired in Arizona in July. (Courtesy of Donna Lazuta)

She had loved the house enough to buy it from her ex-husband when they split. It was still a touchstone for her grown daughters, who left behind things they cherished.

Her eyes swept over piles of ash and rubble. A visual artist who taught at a Los Angeles County high school, Pharis lost more than the furnishings and belongings that fill a house — something more irreplaceable than even family photos.

She escaped what became known as the Creek fire dressed in a pajama top and leggings. She fled at a neighbor’s warning, with only her wire-haired dachshund Sketch in her arms.

Her neighbors, good people who looked out for each other, came by to console her. She was numb.

Looters had already been up there. Who knows what they found and took. Pharis saw only rubble.

“I walked through all of it and I just stared. And then I saw the oddest thing.”

Implanted in the remains of a charred Bird of Paradise, she spotted a pair of copper wings from the weather vane on the cupola of her home, one to either side of a ceramic sword made by one of her art students.

The juxtaposition of a pair of copper wings from a cupola atop her home in Kagel Canyon and a ceramic sword made by one of her students caught the attention of artist Cindy Betzer Pharis on the first day she returned to view the destruction of her Kagel Canyon home after the December 2017 Creek fire. The wings and sword reminded her of a picture of the Archangel Michael that hung over the bed of a nephew who had died earlier in the year. (Courtesy of Cindy Betzer Pharis)

It looked to her that the combustion of the fire propelled the wings at least 25 feet away from the house, and the sword, stuck in a planter outside, landed dead center between them.

“I looked at it and I started to cry.”

Disrupted plans

In the early hours of Dec. 5, 2017, the Creek fire raged through more than 15,600 acres in the Angeles National Forest and parts of Sylmar, Lake View Terrace, Shadow Hills and Sunland-Tujunga.

Pharis looks back on that terrible day — and the months of anguish that followed — from a physical, if not emotional, distance nearly 500 miles away.

She now lives in Sedona, Ariz.

Pharis retired from 38 years of teaching in June, ending her career at Valencia High in Valencia, where she taught visual art since 2002.

She had thought that her leisure time would be spent in that house on Hadler Drive, where she had designed and built her own art studio.

She misses dearly all the neighbors and friends who watched out for her before and after the fire.

“I feel like a lot of people checked up on me. They had my back and I had theirs.”

But the stress of absorbing her loss melded with a fear that haunts victims of wildfires who rebuild: It could happen again.

Pharis had luckily survived unscathed the 2008 Marek fire that killed a man and his dog while destroying 40 homes in Kagel Canyon and two other nearby mountain communities. She only lost a tree in her yard that time.

With the Creek fire, Pharis would learn that her home went up in flames barely four minutes after she gunned her SUV out of her driveway in the predawn hours and raced through flames on the road to escape.

“I didn’t rebuild because I felt like every time there would be smoke and fire, I would be traumatized.”

Cindy Betzer Pharis looks at an object plucked out of the ash and rubble that once was her multi-story home in Kagel Canyon. Pharis lost her house in the December 2017 Creek fire that ravaged parts of Los Angeles and Ventura counties. (Courtesy of Shannon McGinnis)

Feelings of vulnerability were stoked last month by news coverage of the Camp fire in Butte County that has killed at least 86 people. And with the Woolsey fire that hit parts of Los Angeles and Ventura counties and took three lives.

“I cried every day for about a week,” Pharis says of those twin tragedies. “I had such raw emotions … thinking about the people who were lost or who barely made it out.

“I remember the fear I had when I didn’t think I was going to get out.”

‘Who am I?’

The process of dealing with her insurance and mortgage companies in recounting what the fire ravaged and trying to recover financially took its own toll.

Right away, her insurer had advised, start making a list of what was inside the house. Everything. In detail. Pharis began working on that list even before she went back to Hadler Drive to see what might be left.

“Filling out that list, I’d say to myself, ‘I just want to go home.’ And the one thing you can’t do is go home.”

She eventually filled 235 pages. It took her four months.

“You’re trying to move forward, yet all you are doing is remembering everything you had.”

She had to estimate the cost of things, including antique jewelry and other rare possessions that increase in value over time. Appliances, such as her refrigerator, were judged worth far less than when she bought them new.

Typically in a disaster settlement, there are deductions for advance proceeds that might go toward such necessities as clothes, a temporary place to live, and the cost of cleaning up tons of toxic ash and debris.

“I’d say to myself, ‘I just want to go home.’ And the one thing you can’t do is go home.”

She says she got pennies on the dollar for her belongings, but the insurance money for the house itself was enough to pay off the mortgage and make a down payment on her home in Sedona. She sold the land to her closest neighbors.

Pharis, now 62, agonized over whether to rebuild, becoming emotionally and physically sick even as she tried to remain optimistic. A short animated film made by one of her students, titled “The Future is Open,” captures both her anguish and hope.

She decided to move on and left July 1 for Arizona, where she grew up. It puts her closer to family, including her aging parents, who operate a horse and cattle ranch near Prescott.

Her new house is smaller than the 4,000-square-foot home she had in California.

She doesn’t have the view of city lights she once enjoyed from her hillside in Kagel Canyon, but she can see the constellations at night. Sketch loves the nearby dog park and walks among the red rocks.

Sedona is known as an art mecca, but Pharis is still trying to recover that part of herself. She has nothing to show other artists in her new community. She only recently began sketching again, her creativity blocked by the trauma and a depression she continues to fight.

Losing her artwork and her writings made her question her identity.

“If I’m not this,” she would think to herself, “then who am I?”

The good with the bad

Pharis does have other blessings that came her way unexpectedly.

Complete strangers who heard of her plight reached out.

There was Louise Larson, a retired art teacher who rented Pharis a room in her home, close to Valencia High as she finished her last year. They bonded and remain friends.

There was the $42,000 in donations that her students, friends and others raised for her, the $2,000 in art supplies shipped by people at Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, and the dozens of high quality brushes sent by Princeton Art & Brush Co.

Family, friends, students and strangers all stepped up to help visual artist and high school teacher Cindy Betzer Pharis after she lost everything in the December 2017 Creek fire. The Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia sent her boxes of art supplies. (Courtesy of Brittany Singleton)

And there was the pair of wings and the sword that jarred her on her that trip back to see the destruction.

It wasn’t just the arresting image. It was the connection she made to a picture of the sword-wielding Archangel Michael that had hung above the bed of a beloved nephew, Davis Gregg, who had died earlier that year. He took his own life at 39.

Losing him helped Pharis put her own losses in perspective. But she also believes he saved her in another way.

For some reason, she woke up earlier than usual the morning of the fire. That’s how she heard the neighbor’s warning to get out.

Those wings and that sword were the only recognizable things left when she returned.

“I looked at that and I said, Davis, you were here and you woke me up. You are telling me that you woke me up.”

Theresa Walker is a Southern California native who has been a staff writer at The Orange County Register since 1992. She specializes in human interest stories and social issues, such as homelessness. She also covers nonprofits and philanthropy in Orange County. She loves telling stories about ordinary people who do the extraordinary in their communities.

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